Muhammad Salleh

The Man and His World

Muhammad Salleh, commonly known as Mat Salleh, was a leader of mixed Bajau and Sulu parentage who led a prolonged armed resistance against the North Borneo Chartered Company from 1894 to 1900, and whose followers continued to fight in scattered bands until 1905. He was a tall, thin, pock-marked man of commanding personality who lived with his father controlling a small village up the Sugut River on the east coast of Borneo, and whose influence extended downstream among the Bajau communities of the region [1, pp. 2–3]. The revolt he led was not, as Tregonning argues, a simple product of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, but a direct consequence of the company’s financial mismanagement under Managing Director William C. Cowie, whose grandiose infrastructure projects and new taxation created the grievances that Salleh exploited [1, p. 20].

The Revolt and Its Escalation

The immediate trigger was the killing of two Dyak traders in a brawl with Salleh’s men in late 1894, after which he refused to meet company police unless his men remained armed, and was subsequently declared an outlaw [1, p. 3]. In August 1895 he appeared at Sandakan with a large armed following and a list of complaints signed by himself and ten headmen, but was rebuffed by the acting governor, who ordered him away [1, pp. 3–4]. The government’s inability to pursue him effectively, combined with its decision to abandon the Sugut interior, allowed Salleh to regain strength [1, p. 4].

The conflict escalated dramatically on 9 July 1897, when Salleh launched a surprise dawn attack on Gaya Island, the largest west coast depot, with the help of Bajau from the Inanam and Mengkabong rivers. The settlement was burned to the ground, an estimated $100,000 was lost, and the island was never rebuilt [1, p. 5]. The government’s punitive response, which involved burning every house on the Inanam River, brought a protest from the Sultan of Brunei and ultimately led to the annexation of the independent rivers in 1898 [1, pp. 6–7].

The Pardon and Final Campaign

In May 1898 Cowie personally travelled to the interior and offered Salleh a complete pardon, promising him authority over the Tambunan Valley in exchange for loyalty. The concession precipitated a wave of resignations among the company’s administrators, including the West Coast Resident Hewett, who resigned on the grounds that the policy risked the lives of loyal natives to appease disloyal ones [1, pp. 8–9]. Salleh, however, soon resumed raiding the Tambunan Muruts, and by late 1899 the situation had become untenable [1, pp. 10–12].

In January 1900 a force of 100 police and 500 Dusun carriers, equipped with a mountain gun, invested Salleh’s fortified position at Ranau. The siege lasted the month, and on 31 January Salleh was killed emerging from a tunnel as his inner stronghold caught fire. Approximately 300 dead were left behind, comprising 200 Tegaas Muruts and 93 Bajaus [1, p. 13]. The new governor, Hugh Clifford, arrived to find the fort—a complex of three concentric walls with tunnels and concealed sharpened bamboo—being levelled, and ordered the Tegaas tribe fined twenty-five buffaloes and $250, with all fortifications destroyed and firearms surrendered [1, p. 15].

Research and Documentation

Tregonning’s 1956 article remains the standard narrative account of the conflict, grounded primarily in the North Borneo Company Papers held in the Colonial Office Library, London, including governors’ correspondence with the Court of Directors, the Treasurer-General’s diary, and district officers’ field reports [1, pp. 3–18]. His central argument—that the revolt was a product of Cowie’s financial mismanagement rather than inherent indigenous resistance—shifts the analytical focus from the rebel to the administration, and recovers the voices of junior officers such as Hewett, Reddie, Ormsby, and Fraser, whose resignations and field observations reveal the internal fractures in the company’s leadership. The article also documents the literary afterlife of the revolt, noting that Clifford himself later embodied Salleh as a sympathetic hero in his novels Saleh, A Study (1904) and Saleh: A Sequel (1908), while O. Rutter treated the subject in The Golden Rain (1920) [1, pp. 14].

MBRAS Sources

K.G. Tregonning (1956). The Mat Salleh revolt (1894–1905. JMBRAS 29: 20–36

References

K.G. Tregonning (1956). The Mat Salleh revolt (1894–1905 JMBRAS 29(1): 20–36. Read on JSTOR